The gift of less stuff, Midwest edition

Our annual Christmas trip out to visit my in-laws in Indiana was a bit different this year. Instead of going back to Brian's childhood home in Indianapolis, we made our first visit to their new, smaller house in Brownsburg. The new place is a better fit for them in a lot of ways: it's much closer to Brian's brother, there are no stairs, and the HOA takes care of all the exterior maintenance on the house and yard. It is not, however, a better fit for all the stuff they'd accumulated over 40-plus years in their old house. Their guest room closet and over half their garage were stuffed full of boxed-up books, papers, artwork, furniture, lamps, and other items that didn't fit into their new home's smaller floor plan. And that was only a fraction of their discards; the pile at my brother-in-law's house was even bigger, filling up nearly all of the garage and a portion of the family room as well.

Brian wasn't able to go out to Indy and help his folks move last summer, so he felt like the least he could do now was haul away some of this excess material. Our little hatchback was too small to accommodate any of the actual furniture, but we crammed the trunk and back seat with a huge assortment of smaller pieces, including (but by no means limited to):

• Most of his dad's old stereo system: amp, pre-amp, tape deck, and phonograph. (We didn't have room for the massive floor speakers.)
• An old VCR.
• An old-fashioned table lamp.
• Two automatic cat feeders belonging to Brian's brother, which they'd traded in for fancier models. (The old ones used timers; the new ones have chip readers, so each one provides food only for the cat that's carrying the right microchip on its collar. This ensures that the expensive prescription food goes only to the one cat that needs it.)
• 
  A collection of blue-glass Ball jars.
• A folding camp chair.
• A convex mirror.
• A hacksaw and miter box. 
• Several paintbrushes.
• One large sponge.
• A pile of sandpaper. 
• A box of pegboard hooks. 
• An old power strip that doesn't include a surge protector.
• An HDMI splitter, unused in its original box, and a 25-foot HDMI cable.
• About half a dozen powerful magnets pulled out of old hard drives. 

That's a lot of stuff, yet it barely made a dent in the clutter in either house. It's as if the junk just expands to fill the available space: no matter how much you take away, the pile doesn't get any smaller. (I observed much the same phenomenon when I helped my mom clean out the sun porch last Mother's Day; after a whole day emptying out bins and bookshelves, the room didn't look any less full.)

Our job now is to make sure that all the new things we've acquired don't simply sit around taking up space in our house. We only took things that we thought we could use, but we still need to fit them into our home. Fortunately, Brian has this whole week off from work, so we'll have plenty of time to shuffle AV equipment, transfer pantry supplies into our new jars, and rearrange tools in the workshop. (It's been less than a year since we finally got that room looking decent, so I'm particularly anxious to make sure all the new tools get filed neatly away rather than turning it back into a cluttered, chaotic hole.) Watch this space for updates on what we do with all these new-to-us items, and on whether they turn out to solve problems or create new ones.